Felled by the dreaded lurgy in early January I was sidelined from my usual reading routine. It’s hard to concentrate when little spikes of fever send your mind swimming into the stratosphere. The symptoms weren’t that bad but the fatigue was real and concentration was not at peak performance. An Agatha Christie re-read was in order. I read seven of…
I do remember the trial of Dr. Bodkin Adams. My family took The Daily Herald back in 1957 and I was old enough to pay attention. I recall being fascinated by the name Bodkin and who could not be interested in the sensational trial of a doctor accused of drugging and murdering his patient in order to profit from a…
This is a review of a book I have not read that does not actually exist. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this dive into the golden age of crime and detective fiction. An isolated country house in winter and a cast of quirky characters none of whom are quite what they seem. There are family secrets, unrequited love and…
There’s a lovely exhibit currently on show at the Morgan Library. It’s the work of artist-illustrator Ashley Bryan (see below for the Morgan’s description.) Many of the pieces are collages in the vibrant colors of the kind of elementary school construction paper. I could imagine school group trips and the response to the words and the pictures as inspiring “I…
This tweet about toasting marshmallows on a fire stoked with Harry Potters brought to mind an odd incident from my childhood. To the amusement of the world, my home town decided to ban a classic of medieval Italian literature as obscene and pornographic. The year was 1954 and book was Boccaccio’s Decameron. Until that point only three people in the…
With so many books and so little time, it helps to have a little guidance. It also helps when two or even three books can be read simultaneously – thus saving the reader valuable time for even more books. Here then is my current recommended reading list. Something for everyone here. Old Favorites Rediscovered Steppenwolf Hall – A German man…
Together with a whole lot of other readers in the UK in 1976, I read Wilt – the first in a series of over-the-top, grotesque Tom Sharpe novels about the misadventures of a mild-mannered and hapless tech college teacher named Henry Wilt. He’s a rather fuddy-duddy, decent-enough, beer-drinking, everyman kind of chap given to being misunderstood, especially by his wife…
Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in Italy confiscating wine and olive…
‘Oh, I know all about goats,’ Sonia was saying. ‘People give them the same recommendation as the billeting officers did with evacuees – they’re no trouble. For all I know it may be true of goats. But then, like evacuees, they smell, and that’s quite enough for me.’ – Hemlock and After, 1952, Angus Wilson . It’s Britain post-war, and…
“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” – Gertrude Abercrombie After Pied Piper and The Thinking, my explorations led me into the byways of British literature of WW2 evacuation and evacuees. On that journey, I made – and continue to make – discoveries: Writers and…
P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin are of course fictional characters…
A six-point manifesto from psycholinguist Frank Smith – another of those items found in the basement. I must have prepared it as a hand-out for some long-forgotten purpose or another. I was happy to be reunited. Frank Smith – who died last year – was one of those essential giants in the land of learning, literacy, and reading. I loved…
“Phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. … When the stored energy becomes locked in by the spin of the atomic electrons, a triplet state can occur, slowing the emission of light, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.” Phosphorescence is also the title of a book by…
One book leads to another. Six Degrees of Separation comes via Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Readers start with the same book and see where their connections take them by the first Saturday of the month. The starting point for January 2021 is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020). Follow the hashtag #6degrees on Twitter to check out…